Saturday, September 7, 2013

Allen Ginsberg June 1986 Radio Interview

City Lights put up (as a podcast, on-line) earlier this summer, an interview (a phone-interview) with Allen, dating from the mid-1980's, the (Ronald) Reagan era, (June 2 1986, in fact, the day before Allen's 60th birthday!). We thought to shine some more light on it, to feature it this weekend.
Here follows a transcription. Allen, with the two interviewers, Walter Isgro, and another, un-named, (the context being a visit to the state of Maine), discuss poetic history, censorship, art, education, politics (both global and local) and Allen and the Beats as representatives of a tradition, the tradition of "good old American individualism".
"The Moral Majority", "Star Wars" (Strategic Defence Initiative), "The Rapture" - just to refresh you with some of those now-dated terms!

Interviewer: First of
all this is going to be.. you’re going to have me, and then you’ll be talking
with Walter Isgro, my partner in crime, here, and.. First off. Allen... or do you prefer, Mr. Ginsberg?

AG: No, Allen’s alright,
too.

Interviewer: Okay,
Allen, perhaps you can tell us.. Now you got interested in poetry, I take it your
father did a little bit of poetry as well

AG: My father, Louis was a poet. He lived in Paterson, New Jersey. And he wrote.. was of the old school of poetry, he
wrote very beautiful lyrics actually, that were in the anthologies of his day, which was the
thirties and forties and fifties, the old Louis Untermeyer Modern American and British poetry, which was a book that was used in the high schools when
I went to high school in Paterson New Jersey, Paterson Central High, so I had
it in the family. It was a family business, so to speak.

Interviewer: Was your
father a major influence on you and some of your work?

AG: Well yes,
certainly, in matters of sentiment, you know, of feeling, and also, I learned
from him, very early, all the different forms that are used in traditional
nineteenth- century poetry, also, since he taught Milton and Wordsworth
and Blake in high school and later in college, when I was a little kid,
(which is to say, 5,6,.8, 9, 10, 11, 12 years old), I used to hear him stompingaround the house reciting Milton, or pieces from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” - or Edgar Allan Poe’s “(The) Raven”. Do you know (“The Raven”)?

Interviewer: Oh yes.

AG: [begins reciting "The Raven"] - “Once
upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,/Over many a quaint and
curious volume of forgotten lore,/While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly
there came a tapping,/As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber
door./'Tis some visitor,' I muttered…Only this, and nothing more.”

So I remember all those
rhythms in my head when I was a little kid so that got me off to a good
educated start to be a professional poet, and then, when I grew older, I ran
into Jack Kerouac when I was seventeen years old, and William Burroughsthat same year. They had a new idea of poetry which was to write
your mind, or to write the way you talk and to write out of your real
experience, rather than making it up like Poe was – imaginary (out of) the old
archaic romance(s) - so then I began writing more realistically, and, I guess, around
1950,I ran into Doctor William Carlos Williams in Rutherford,
New Jersey, nearby Paterson. He was a very great modern poet whose idea was to
write the way you talk, use the rhythms of talk, making poetry as interesting
as actual conversation with a good friend.

Interviewer: Now is
that something that they also picked up from, say, Walt Whitman as well?

AG: Well, I think any
art form you’ve got to come out of your own experience, you can’t just be a
re-hash of someone-else’s great master-work, or of the newspapers , (what you
read in the newspapers), or what you see on television. You certainly can’t be
parroting what the President says, otherwise you’d be a mindless idiot - like
almost everybody in America!

Interviewer: Well, why
do you think a lot of people follow him [the President, President Reagan]?

AG: Oh, Because they
stick their faces in television sets for six hours a day and that’s their whole
life! – That’s why they follow him. He [Ronald Reagan]’s an old actor,
he’s a faker, or he’s a specialist in that medium of having phony emotions,
acting.

Interviewer: Well, you
speak a lot, or rather you write a lot, I should say, about alienated
Americans, I guess you’d have to call them, the Beat Generation.

AG: No I don’t think
they were alienated Americans. We were the old-fashioned good ol’ American
individualists! We were the kind of people that George Washington and Tom Paine liked.

Interviewer: You don’t
see these people as more or less outcasts in their own time at that time you
wrote about?

AG: No, no. I think
that America was outcast at that time. They were getting into the Atom Bomb,
getting into foreign wars in Indo-China which they were going to lose anyway.
(And) they were getting into conformity, they were getting into censorship,
they were getting into all sorts of horrible things that were un-American,
getting into organized religion taking over the government like the Moral Majority wants to do now . The founders of our country didn’t want any
organized religion running the country. That’s why they separated the Church
and the State.

Interviewer: So these
revolutionaries that you are writing about maybe are the... It’s American, it’s on course..

AG: The good old-time
Americans that ran for Tom Paine and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson
and Walt Whitman, (Henry David) Thoreau, and, all the great.. all the great patriarchs, the real Americans, not those guys up for
political office who who wrap themselves around the flag like bunch of scout
groups.. Like the President!

Interviewer: Yeah, like the President.

AG: Like the President..

Interview: Allen is
this perhaps the most important..

AG: ...(who) asks about
God and hardly ever goes to church, who asks about family and has got a
dispersed family (because you are (he is) just interested in power, and doing everything against what the founders of our country wanted
to do. I’d say.. (So) I say that the President of the United States Ronald Reagan
is Un-American. I’m talking as someone in the lineage
of Thoreau and Whitman - and Ralph Waldo Emerson -

Interviewer: Ah, there
we go.

AG: There’s America.

Interviewer: Yes – and
Thoreau, I loved his writings

AG: Well, that’ s what
we learned in grammar school. What’s going on now in Washington isn’t anything
like we learned at grammar school, where democracy was supposed to be democracy
(and) against purity.

Interviewer: So the people you wrote about in the (19)50s and early (19)60s are much like the
people of the 1980s?

AG: Well, there were people around in the 1980s who were
independently-minded adults (who were not) plugged into the electric network.

Interviewer: Why do you
think that might be, Allen?

AG: Oh, I guess, at
some point or other when you grow up you suddenly realize that you’ve got to
make your own life, you’ve got to make your own judgments, that an individual
human consciousness is a real thing and that the notion of a faith is not quite so real, more of an abstraction, that your fidelity is to
your friends, to your own life and to your family, to maybe the community, to the community that you live in, not just some nasty
abstract Nazi Germany, or Stalinist Russia, or Capitalist America.

Interviewer: So people live for themselves…however..

AG: With other people, certainly ...but, they can’t
live.. It’s like saying to Adolf Hitler, I don’t want to live for you! –
I don’t want to live for you!. Just like saying to Ronald Reagan I don’t want to
live for your ideas of Armageddon!..

Interviewer: And if
people had done that perhaps we wouldn’t have had the problems that we had in
the (19)40’s.

AG: Well, I think so.
Well, we still would have had to deal with Hitler, but I don’t think we.. At the present moment, like, what this
nation, I think, needs, is some spiritual rediscovery not some fake god that asks you for money over
television.

Interviewer: Allen,
I’ve read that your followers, even some of your critics, say that much of your
work is prophetic in almost the way that the Bible was.

AG: I don’t think so.

Interviewer: Yeah, I
was going to ask you what you thought
about that?

AG: Well, it depends
what you mean by “prophetic”

Interviewer: (Well, some recognition of) ….good and evil, for example.

AG: (Well, you find) what's in your heart to write. Then you can touch on
something that’s close to you, and that's real and that's sincere,and then, if you lay that out in
public, other people say, “ok, he’s not trying to make money off of it, he's just telling everybody what he thinks, he’s not looking for a vote, he's just
saying what he thought a minute ago", so if someone comes out in public and says it frankly and sincerely, it’s a lot different from what you read about in
the papers, or what you hear on television, because, after all, television
is there to sell you somethin’ – not to advise you, whereas poetry’s there to
tell you what the truth of the poet is, what he really thinks when he's all alone at
night in bed talking to nobody but himself.

Interviewer: Just
getting very introspective..yeah

AG: No, speaking frankly to yourself, instead of conning others. So you con yourself too. But, the
whole point of poetry is not to con yourself.

Interviewer: The whole
point is truth, I take it.

AG: Yeah - and there’s no
abstract truth. I define it (truth) as, “what you really think when you’re not trying
to lay a trip on other people” - You know if you just look(ed) around at anyone
in public life and ask yourself, “Are they saying what they’re saying in
private? or are they saying in
public something different than what they say in private? . That’s the
critereon, I would say - talking
in public the way you talk to yourself in private.

Interviewer: Allen, I’m
going to turn it over to Walter Isgro for a few questions to ask you as well,
and, once again, I thank you very much for taking time out from what I know
must be a hectic day…

AG: It is a bit
hectic. Someone just told me they
were taking a big vote on censorship here in Maine..

Interviewer: Oh! that
is a hot issue. Next Tuesday,
they…

AG: Those people who
claim they’re talking for God are trying to re-impose censorship on the good
ol’ individualistic Americans again!

Interviewer: It’s
something that comes along all the time, and probably always will - but I don’t
think it’ll ever pass..

WI: Hi. We’re from the
Waterville Arts Project, We’re a
non-profit foundation in town here, trying to spread our wings,

AG: Yeah

WI: (So) we really
appreciate what you’re doing.

AG: Are you folks
taking part in that reading of banned books, that open reading by Maine
writers, at the State Office building - that’s two nights, isn’t it?

WI: Well, right now,
we’re kind of brand-new. We’re in the embryonic stage, and people either don’t
know we’re around or ..

AG: What do you do?

WI: Well, right now,
I’m just kind of.. what do you call it? I’m a painter, that does carpentry to
feed my habit.

AG: Uh-hmm.

WI: What I did is start
this organization about a year ago to try to support children in the arts, and
to give artists some kind of outlet for their work in the community rather than
running out of town all the time, or out of state, to survive.

WI: Yeah I read about..
where I found (that) you were going to be here is I read it in the paper.

AG: We did a reading to
raise money for them last night

WI: Aha! I hope they’re happy about that.

AG: They’re also one of
the groups that come out on June 9th from one to three p.m. at the
State Office building. They’re reading some old-time banned books to show the
public that there have been trying to censor books all through the centuries,
including, some of our classics.

WI : Yeah, that’s true,
I …Unfortunately, I agree with much of what you’re saying. I wish that times
were not the way they are.

AG: Fortunately, we
agree

WI: Well. I mean
unfortunately because I wish the situation didn’t exist

WI: Well, what I’m
trying to do is encourage all the types of art, painting, visual, performing,
and literary, art.

AG: And in what
particular style? (are you involved in) particularly

WI: In myself,
personally?

AG: Yeah, in your
painting?

WI : I don’t know it’s
kind of hard to describe

AG: Who are your
masters?

WI: Well, I
most(ly)... the Impressions.. European Impressionists were the ones
that influenced me the most, and then I found, back when I was in Europe,
people said there was a likeness to (a) Modigliani, and I hadn’t never
even heard of him at the time..

AG: He’s very
interesting, his letter-writing
(writing to) Emile Bernard,
the Impressionist painter, talking about perception itself, (and) the optical
field, how do you transfer what
appears to the eye to the (nature) of the canvas?

WI: That’s an
interesting question.AG: Yeah and he said that he could stand in one
spot and compose a painting, and then move his head to the left and create an
entirely different composition

WI: Exactly, exactly.
Someone called me recently - it had to do with video - you mentioned tv - how are images made on television, and
used as an example, as a fact that you see in this little screen an event, such as a car- accident taking place on
a street, and the illusion is that the entire street is in chaos, when, in
fact, it’s a staged production on a tiny corner of the street. So I can see how
that would relate to the canvas too, how... What do you think about the borders, the traditional borders
that separated visual, literary and performing arts being broken down now?

AG: Well, it’s just a
development of ..I think mainly because of video, in a way.. It’s a good thing,
I suppose. I myself don’t (compose) music, tho’ I do poetry-and-music very
often. I have written a play, but I’ve never tried to write a musical play -
but I’ve got a friend, Ed Sanders, who’s writing a big funny opera on “Star Wars”..

WI: Alright!

AG: ..where it’s rock n
roll and pure poetry. It’s politics-based as well as theater-staged. It begins
with a scene in the Oval office with this baritone President singing an aria
which goes – [Allen sings] - “This Evil Empire”

WI: Ha! That sounds
great!

AG: He just took the whole natural scene at
the White House and put it on stage as an idiot melodrama

WI: Well I think that’s
the proper perspective, right there, what.. disappointed, maybe, that John Wayne is the President , huh?

AG: Well, somebody may
be disappointed.. There’s another scene
He’s got some born-again preacher at the Pentagon talking about "The Rapture".
You ever hear about "The Rapture"?

WI: I don’t think so.

AG: Oh,well that’s some
of those “born again” people that believe in Armageddon think they’re
the only ones that are going to be saved.

WI: Okay.

AG: ..for the Rapture...
When everything explodes with the Atom Bomb, they’ll be taken up to Heaven all by themselves. They’re
praying for the Rapture !

WI: Oh well! …The movie what was that? with
the guy riding the Atom Bomb?

WI: Right, right. I
think those movies now, when I see them once in a while, I’d say they were
predicting what’s happening now.

AG: Yes so that was the
nature of a mixed-media
performance-comedy-distraction-politics-reality-unreality–Surrealism-technicolor-Hollywood-money-no-money,
that kind of odd image-combination.

WI: Yeah? – I feel
pretty lucky to be alive when all these things are going on.

AG: Yes, it’s lovely to
survive these things that are going on, and die our nice-old-natural-death of
cancer in our death-bed, instead of getting blown up in The Rapture!

WI:Yeah Yeah, I agree
with you.

AG: I don't believe that
Rapture will come, unfortunately, (for) those who want it.

WI: I agree with you there. I remember, back when I
first started reading your work and your contemporaries, you weren’t considered
famous or popular then, and I was
wondering.. I’ve read a couple of nasty things, once in a while, and
kind of like just skimmed them over, but… do you think that America’s more
respectful to you now than it used to be?

AG: Oh yes, my poetry’s (now included) in all the anthology (and they teach it) in college and
high school, so it’s probably standard by now. Sure. That’s not a problem. The problem is having people understand
what it means, understand what “Beat”
said.WI: Yeah, okay.AG: ..you know, begin to look into their own lives, enlarge their
spiritual lives, become more aware of themselves and their own feelings, aware
of their own love, aware of the brilliance of the sky, aware of the greatness of the situation that we
have of being alive in the universe, (it's) sort of like taking care of themselves and
others in the universe.

Interviewer: So it
seems to me that what you folks were saying, and still are saying, is that the
wonder of life..

AG: I think.. Well, to be more aware of the brilliance
of (the) earth, and enough aware so you dnot going to throw your beer cans on the moon,
thatyou don’t throw your industrial excrement into the ocean, you don’t
wreck the Garden of Eden that we’ve got.

WI: No,right.

AG: …which means really
an end to all nuclear power.

WI: YeahAG: I notice the Russians,
I read in the paper today, the Russians are building this tombfor the(ir) Chernobyl thing - they said they’re gonna bury it for
hundreds and hundreds of years, until the radiation (goes..), but, actually, we’re
stuck with that all over. Atom(ic) plants.. is irreducible radiation waste of
plutonium, that lasts twenty-four thousand years in half-life…(you have got
to consider) how
they gonna get rid of that?. They can(t).. Now they want to bury it in the (Texas) Panhandle, .so the ranchers
in Texas are getting upset - and who wouldn’t be?

WI: And they’re going
to try Maine and Mainers are pretty shook-up.

AG: Yeah, when it comes
home, you realize the consequences.

WI: Oh, definitely.

AG: Basically, it’s
what they call excrement, the waste
product..

WI: Oh sure.

AG: …of a
hyper-rationalistic, prideful, vague, science that that did not figure out the
whole equation…that got half the equation, but hasn't figured out the whole chemical equation - what do you do with waste
product?

WI: YeahAG: You know that old story of the apprentice to the Sorcerer? (He) got the formula to make the broom carry the water for him from
the well so he doesn’t have to do it himself, he didn’t figure out the formula
to make the broom stop carrying the water, so he got flooded.

WI: Did you ever in
your travels run into a little issue called Planet
Drum?

WI: Yeah, Peter Berg,
and I helped them put out one issue
and the issue that we worked on was dealing with nuclear waste.

AG: Right (He) was a
specialist in remembering that.

WI: Yeah, I remember
that people were laughing and they were saying, "this is totally absurd, ten thousand years? whoever heard of such a joke?
these guys are crazy, they don’t know what they’re talking about!"

AG: Right

WI: Now you can read it
in your local home-town (newspaper)

AG: Yeah, well, the
fact is, people don’t realize it. The half-life of plutonianis twenty-four
thousand years.. before the plutonian becomes physically inert.. The full life of plutonian is two hundred and forty thousand years. And what you realize (is) that according to the "born-again" people (who love nuclear stuff), according to their interpretation, the earth is only six thousand years old to begin with - the Garden of Eden was 404 BC ! So plutonian itself lasts something like four times as long as the Garden of Eden! (in half-life!)WI: Isn't that wonderful!AG: What are they gonna do? Send armed guards to sit on elevators to guard.. in the Panhandle for twenty-fourthousand years? That's the biggest vanity you ever heard of!..WI: I knowAG: ..ancient Babylonian(s) (thinking) it will last forever!

WI: It seems like history repeats itself, but (and) the weaponry is the only thing that changes.AG: Yeah, but I don't think we've seen this particular one before.....WI: NoAG: What they..WI: But it still seems the same old power struggle. I don't know. Maybe I'm off-base.AG: Well, the inventor of the Bomb said, because we have an absolute weapon that is going to be absolutely up-to-date, we don't have to change it. Einstein-ian man will have to have a change in consciousness in order to deal with the unobstructed aggression (and find) a viable and workable situation...

WI: Exactly.

WI: I just
have one more question, if you’d be kind enoughto..

AG: I don’t know if I
answered your (last) question.

WI: You did, you did.
In fact, it’s amazing. I’ve got a list of questions in front of me, you
answered every one of them without my having to answer them – that’s crazy!

AG: What haven’t we
covered?

WI: The only thing that
I was wondering about, you know, in the light of all that’s going on. I hear a
lot of negative stuff on the street nowadays, but I was wondering - I like to
try and be as positive as I can – I was wondering, what you think.. what
direction poetry is headed in?

AG: Well I think it’ll
have to be.. Well, I’ll give you… anybody who wants to know, come hear my
poetry reading tonight at the University of Maine..

AG:…tonight, tomorrow
and Wednesday, Thursday, at the University of Maine at Orono. My reading
is at seven-thirty tonight - but what we’re all, four of us, doing (is) our thinghere - trying
to check out our own minds, trying to say, in public, what.. the way we talk to
each other in private, talk to ourselves.. and (to) deal withthe thoughts that
pass through our heads, and put them out in public. So it’s not high art thought.

WI: Ok.

AG: So I don’t see how
poetry can go anywhere except through that kind of sincerity, whatever form it
takes, whether it’s written in sonnets or written in vernacular (though I think it
will be tending more towards the idiomatic and vernacular language). I think the poets will pay more attention to
the tones of their voices, the different pitch of the vowels as they speak them, because it's the tone that gives you the feel of the emotion, like tone leads the pitch, like, the way I’m talking to you now.So just like when
you talk to a baby, I know people who.. (so) you find tones which people can understand, you find the rhythms that people use in their everyday speech, that people will recognize, like (Bob) Dylan, instead of being up there like a narcissist making up a beautiful lot of castles in the air, talking about our real problems, (talking in the)pitch
of idiomatic speech and the rhythms of idiomatic speech, find those rhythms
which are more vivid, most muscular, characteristic of our speech, and compos(ing) poems out of those rhythms. In other words, making poems out of our own lives.

AG: Originally (that) was what the Beat
Generation was about - you're getting out
from under a whole boat-load of.. (woe), and, when it came.. more to.. ((not) trying to rehash old poems, trying to write pretty poems that sound like everybody else - Hiawatha!), (but, instead)
begin talking turkey about our own feet, eyes, brain, thoughts, mind, speech….

WI: That sounds good.
You know, what makes me feel feel really high is the fact that I thought that
when I was reading (of course, I didn’t have anything to bounce it offbut
now I’m hearing you say it. So I guess I got the message

AG: Well, we got a
couple of slogans that go with that – “Writing is writing your mind”
(so) write your mind

WI: Yeah..sounds right
to me. I don’t see a difference myself. The only thing I see is the difference
in tool(s).

AG: Yes, It’s just a
different means of expression, but (there) spoken. Painting is with the
material, Speech is with the breath and the air..

WI: Yes ..and recently we interviewed a dancer, and I said when I watch dancers I see paintings in space, and
that’s how I feel about poetry, and then what you did tho’, to me (in those
years, and I was I guess..)

AG: Well, they’ve paid
so much money for it, they’ve got to find a use for it.

WI: Oh yeah.

AG: They’ve got a whole
economy practically built on it. They’re robbing all the
money from the poets and the artists and shifting it all over to the pigs in
the Pentagon (by “pigs”, I don’t mean that they’re pigs in the sense that.. (but) they’re at the trough, the so-called "pork-barrel".

WI: I think it’s time
for all the artists in the world to take over now because…

WI: Well, Maine to me
is the cave. It was funny because I was saying to a friend of mine today, Jeez,
ya know, before I moved to Maine, I used to... Allen Ginsberg’s name used to pop up
here or there or somewhere, anywhere, you know what I mean?AG: Uh-huhWI: And then I moved
to Maine in 1970 and I never heard of you again!AG: Good for me!WI: I never heard of anything
again! So.. but, and, along with that wave, another wave was developing, and that’s
the wave of the artist. Like, when
I first came up here, sixteen years ago, it was very rare to meet anyone that
spoke about writing or performing or whatever, now everywhere you look is
exhibits, readings, shows, plays, music events, it’s great!

AG: I wonder, however, if that isn't the fore-runner of the pushing out, the invasion of the so-called civilization..

WI: Oh that’s what’s
going to happen, I’m sure.

AG: I’m wondering if the number of
artists who seek refuge up here in the appeal for free expression andcivilized communication. I wonder if that isn't.. a sort of a biological
feeler, in advance of the heavy wave, heavy investment, that’s coming later. It
may not be such a good sign.

WI: I agree with you there. In one respect, it seems to be a blessing and in another respect it
definitely could be that the life-boat’s going to get too full too fast.

AG: Yeah, well, what
it’s also going to mean is that the artist community, the first wave, is going to be supporting what’s coming ahead and...

WI: Yeah, That too. I
see.

AG: It is likely that
the first wave, the first
signal, will be attacked, or censored, or be vetted and not realized that the artist is doing a service in reporting the
problem (of what might have been) the demon of Greed,
that is to say.. greed..

WI: It sounds to me..
It sounds to me.. Oh yeah. Mammon, the God Mannon. It sounds like that’s
what you’re doing here now..

AG: Well what we’re
doing is, actually, teaching
poetry, basically teaching sensitization of mind, which is a new thing, teaching people to notice what they notice, (and
trying myself to notice what we notice), notice our own surprised mind, and noticing the vividness of our experience, appreciating the vividness of nature itself, and that is our riches, instead of..

WI: Yeah that sounds
great to me...sounds good to me. My
only regret is I don’t have any way to get over to Orono.

AG: ..Well there are people who live up here. Seven-thirty at night I’m reading. So, if you jump into your car, (and if
there’s any) aging beatniks that want to hear what I’m writing this year, then they're all welcome.

WI: Yeah, my car is two
worn-out sneakers! ..Yeah, I'm going to have to do something..

AG: How about some
wings on them and fly there? You’re an artist, grow some wings, make yourself
some wings!

WI: Yeah, yeah,
definitely.

AG: Don't get too near the sun, tho'!WI: No, no. I’m going to have to
grow wings to carry my two kids on too. I got my two boys with me, my partners.

WI: Oh yeah, these guys
are incredible! They just blow my mind. I’m so happy when I see them.. To me,
they’re the connection, they’re the key, right there. If I…

AG: How’s the schools
here in Maine? They got enough money for educating the kids?

WI: Well, you know,
surprisingly enough, obviously, people set their standards and they never reach
their standards but to me, I think
Maine schools, as a whole, are decent, they try their best to teach the values
that you were speaking of earlier, Me? to me? like, oh, people might not take
this the right way but I think a lot of Maine is twenty to thirty years behind
the rest of the country and I do mean that in a positive way because they are
trying.. like, I use my children as an example – my children love to go to
school. Now I went to school in Brooklyn, New York, and I hated every second of
it, I dreaded every second of it..

AG (It was maybe) kind
of violent?

WI: Yeah and it makes
me feel good that my children come home from school and say Wow!, I had a great
day at school today. I learned a lot of nice things. So I would say, from my
personal experience, the schools seem decent and they’re very very concerned
with cultural activities for the children. They want the kids to have the freedom to draw or paint or ..

AG: Do they have poets here in
the school too teaching contemporary poetry?

WI: Well, they’re
trying, you know money’s always the monster that makes the talk. You don’t have
a lot of money, there are a lot of things that are excluded from your
school, but there are (there is) also the
Maine Arts and Humanities, which
tries to fund, make funding available for artists residencies. So there are
exposed, yes definitely.

AG: (I think
(they’re) getting more sensitive
and less and less inclined to juveline pranks.

WI: Oh yeah, I
definitely notice the kids using their energy toward constructive things rather than destructive things. I
remember when I was a kid it was
hanging out in the alley, and doing whatever, smashing this or ganging up
on that – but these kids around here, they’re really on the ball.

AG: They gang up on
their imagination.

WI: Yeah that’s it.
They do have imagination, and they’re not afraid to use it and that’s one thing
I’m really happy to see Because my son said the other day, that it seems to him
like most big people’s imaginations are asleep. I laughed about that one.

AG: Well, just because people get discouraged, because they think that the reality of theworld is too tough for them, and it's just idiot sentimentality to indulge in, or further blocking(of) their feelings and dreams, (from) entering - and it is, very often, sentimentality, except that it's only through alternative (things) that we can figure out what it is that we want in the future.

make it real, put it in 3-D, and battle.. so, housing-projects and marriages (and)..).... The imagination really is what starts things going, so development of a big imagination is a good thing, in the sense that..children are not naive, they are being straight and thoughtful so (give them the opportunity to) exercise more of the range of thought possible.. (here possible)... on the Maine coast.